The rapid spread of connected devices that can listen and locate has been a boon for law enforcement. Any new technology hooked up to the web has the potential to become a surveillance device, even if it’s original purpose was benign, as shown in a 2016 Arkansas murder investigation where Amazon was asked to hand over audio from a suspect’s Echo.
But such information and much more, I’ve learned, has long been retrievable from cars. Indeed, court documents reveal a 15-year history of what’s been dubbed “cartapping,” where almost real-time audio and location data can be retrieved when cops order vehicle tech providers to hand it over.
One of the more recent examples can be found in a 2014 warrant that allowed New York police to trace a vehicle by demanding the satellite radio and telematics provider SiriusXM provide location information. The warrant, originally filed in 2014 but only recently unsealed (and published below in full), asked SiriusXM “to activate and monitor as a tracking device the SIRIUS XM Satellite Radio installed on the Target Vehicle for a period of 10 days.” The target was a Toyota 4-Runner wrapped up in an alleged illegal gambling enterprise.
SiriusXM told FORBES it complied with the order and did so by switching on the stolen vehicle recovery feature of its Connected Vehicle Services technology, which is only available in a subset of cars it supplies (the satellite radios alone cannot be tracked as the telematics services can). The request was, then, akin to the police demanding Apple hand over a customer’s location data by turning on the Find My iPhone feature. The company said it also worked sporadically with law enforcement to provide such information, noting it always required a valid warrant, estimating it receives five valid court orders a year to activate the stolen vehicle recovery feature to monitor a suspect. It declined to offer on-record comment…
… “I could make an argument to the contrary, which is based on the fact that we are increasingly surrounded by embedded interactive, broadcast technologies and therefore can tend to forget the fact that we may be broadcasting as we hold what we think are private conversations in a vehicle or, for that matter, other mundane settings,” Brenner added.
“My sense is that people take the technology so completely for granted that they forget that it has the capacity to bite back… Most people are still quite naive about embedded technologies, and therefore tend to forget that it can compromise privacy.”
End of quote.
Just a little heads up. And if you think this monitoring is limited to official law enforcement, you are yet to understand the world you live in.
Richard
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